WHO would you be more disposed to believe: the world’s biggest podcaster or the world’s biggest rock star? The U2 frontman, Bono, appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience this week to promote his new film, but immediately got involved in a standoff with the host, who is a friend of Elon Musk.
Mr Musk recently left the Trump administration, rather precipitately, after heading its so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where his primary achievement appears to have been dismantling the US government’s aid department. Bono, who has been a campaigner for humanitarian aid for four decades, pointed to a Boston University study that predicts 300,000 deaths as a result.
Bono knows what he’s talking about here. It was largely due to his personal influence that, in 2003, President George Bush established the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Until the arrival of Mr Musk, PEPFAR had provided more than $120 billion for AIDs treatments, saving more than 26 million lives, largely in Africa. It has ensured that 7.8 million babies have been born HIV-free there.
Mr Musk’s response was confined to a post on X, which he owns. He said of the singer: “Such a liar/idiot . . . zero people have died” as a result of the USAID cuts.
Generally speaking, the U2 singer’s facts are more reliable than the Tesla man’s. Mr Musk set out — preposterously waving a chainsaw — to save $2 trillion from the US federal budget. When he left last week, he had managed only $170 billion, according to his DOGE website. And even that is a dodgy figure, says the Financial Times. The paper has investigated the website’s claims and found that most of them cannot be verified: its numbers are overstated, its maths is questionable, and it claims credit for savings made under President Biden.
It has now emerged that, during a heated US cabinet meeting in March, President Trump ruled that, henceforth, his department heads should have the final say over cuts — and told his friend Elon to use a “scalpel rather than the hatchet” when downsizing government. Instead, Mr Musk has slunk back to Tesla to try to do something about the $800 billion that has been wiped off its share price since he began his political exploits. Ironically, he has managed to wipe four times more off his own shares than he has from the federal budget.
All this would be high comedy were its consequences not so serious. A study by the University of Oxford suggests that the impact of US aid cuts could be more severe than the one that Bono cited. Recently published in The Lancet, it estimates that, without PEPFAR, 500,000 children could die from AIDS in the next five years; another million could become HIV-positive; and 2.8 million children could be orphaned — eroding two decades of progress.
That is a projection, but, on the ground, the cuts are already being felt. HIV clinics that provided anti-retroviral therapy have closed in South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, Namibia, Angola, and Malawi. Malaria drugs have stopped in Myanmar. In South Sudan, where child malnutrition is ten times above the emergency threshold, US-funded soup kitchens have shut.
And, as for Sir Keir Starmer’s aid cuts . . . I will return to them another day.
